I was just thinking earlier today that things were finally all going smoothly on the computer front. My new laptop has been spiffy and has been a pleasure all around. I haven't experienced any of the horrible and dire predictions put forth by many online Cassandras about buying a HP. I've also just finished paying off all of the credit card bills that had stacked up because of the laptop purchase just happened to stack up with some other large expenditures. I was pondering that the only thing left to make things complete was to purchase a 5-disk RAID system so I could have enough storage and not have to worry about data loss. The price for 2 TB drives have come down a lot lately and you can get a bare one for ~$100 and one in an enclosure for around $20 more. I had been tempted to pick up another external just for temporary use but had convinced myself to be patient.

So it pretty much goes without saying that my main 1.5 TB external just died on me. The really aggravating part is it's not even the drive that's dead. The fucking i/o bit apparently broke off the inside of the enclosure and fell off, now spending its time rattling around. I'll bet dollars to donuts that the drive inside is just fine but I can't get to it. The enclosure is designed so the only way to open it after it's been snapped shut is to pry it open, breaking the plastic locks. I'm darkly certain that cracking it open will almost certainly void my warranty. That means I'm left with 2 unpleasant choices:

1) Send the drive in for replacement knowing that the data on the drive will simply never be recoverable.

2) Crack the sucker open and retrieve my data knowing that I won't be able to get the enclosure replaced.

In years past this wouldn't have been a hard decision. Hell, I would have cracked this sucker open so quickly there would be plastic shards flying around the room 30 seconds in. That was because in years past I lacked the storage space, planning, and bakabt. What all three of those have done is made it so that much of the data is actually backed up and the data that isn't, well, I can access it on bakabt at pretty high download speeds. It still means I'm going to have to spend weeks upon weeks re-downloading ridiculous amounts of files but at least none of it is irreplaceable. It's going to absolutely kill my ratio though considering it's probably close to a god damn terrabite of anime/files I lost.

I'm going to give Seagate a call in a couple hours when their customer service center opens up and see if I can get an exemption to break the case open. I'm pretty certain the answer will be no, but I should try. *sigh* Maybe this is telling me that I should just stop procrastinating and buy the RAID system already. I was hoping to save up some money considering how close Origins and Chicago/Gencon are, but it might be worth the piece of mind. The RAID system will probably end up costing me at least $700 when it's all said and done, and there's the added stress of not really knowing what I'm doing beyond plug 'n play. If I run into problems, it's very unlikely I'd be able to fix it.